Zodiac Unmasked (18 page)

fingertips, a white handkerchief tied over the lower part of his face. The sleeping owner awakened to find a man standing over her, brandishing a

basebal bat. Snatching up a rifle under her bed, she sent a glancing blow to his arm. Ripping the rifle away, he lacerated her forehead with the bat.

Her daughter, awakened by the struggle, glimpsed the intruder fleeing down the hal . “He was dressed in a dark nylon ski jacket, dark pants, navy-

blue knit cap, and wearing welding goggles,” she said, “but before I could get a better look, he switched off the light and vanished.” He left a bloody

handprint on the wal , but no fingerprints. In the entire time he had been in the house he had not spoken. The Contra Costa County Sheriff’s

Department issued an al -points bul etin for him; they believed he might be Zodiac.

Friday, February 4, 1972

Seven long months
had crawled by since Armstrong and Toschi had questioned Leigh Al en that sizzling August morning. As far as they knew he

was stil attending spring and fal sessions at Sonoma State. Probably a hundred new suspects’ names had crossed their desk in that time. Al en’s

name lay somewhere at the bottom of that pile. And stil the tips poured in. “A lot of people would want to cooperate and forward this or that to you,”

Toschi told me. “Al the while you get the feeling down deep that they’re trying to pick your brain. The nagging feeling was that the case was a ‘round

neck.’ The round neck means the trash basket in your office, which means it’s going to end up in a file as ‘Unsolved.’

“We just couldn’t handle al the tip cal s. The other guys in the office were getting angry at us. ‘Hey, guys, we didn’t write the letters,’ we told them.

‘We just answer the phone. If we turn somebody off, hang up on what could be a positive lead—we’re not going to make this case and we’ve got to

make this case. Please don’t hang up on anybody.’” They fol owed up the most promising tips, but time was on Zodiac’s side. In two weeks, the

State Supreme Court would rule capital punishment unconstitutional. Thus Zodiac, if captured, would no longer face the death penalty. Witnesses

and surviving victims, fearful of Zodiac, went into hiding or moved away. Physical evidence began to be lost or destroyed. Meanwhile, the

detectives could only speculate what the “Cipher Slayer” was doing.

In Santa Rosa
at 4:00 P.M., Maureen Lee Sterling and Yvonne Weber left the Redwood Ice Skating Rink at Steele Lane. The two twelve-year-olds

began to walk home, stopping along the way. Sterling, long brown hair parted in the middle, wore blue jeans, a purple pul over shirt, a red sweatshirt

with a hood, and brown suede shoes. Weber dressed similarly—blue jeans, lavender and white tweed pul over shirt, black velvet coat, and brown

suede boots. Like her companion, she had blue eyes and parted her long blond hair in the middle. Both girls were known to hitchhike. Along their

way, they disappeared.

Leigh Al en quit the oil refinery at 4:00 P.M. each day and left immediately to beat the traffic. His route from Pinole took him west on Highway 37

to San Rafael, where it intersected 101 North. He drove on to Novato, Petaluma, Sonoma, and final y Cotati. A little before five he would have

crossed the girls’ path.

Saturday, March 4, 1972

Sixteen days before
the vernal equinox, at 5:00 P.M., Kim Wendy Al en left her job at Natural Foods, a Larkspur health food store. Twenty minutes

later the nineteen-year-old Santa Rosa Junior Col ege student was seen at the Bel Avenue Freeway entrance. She began hitchhiking north on 101,

hefting an orange backpack and clutching a straw carry-bag. A beige three-quarter-length coat protected her against the chil wind. Like the little

girls from the skating rink, she had blue eyes and long, light-brown hair parted in the middle. Like them, she vanished. The next day, two men

discovered her nude body in a creek bed three miles from Bennett Val ey Road. She had been strangled with white hol ow-core clothesline. Her

body showed signs of being bound spreadeagled for some time somewhere else. Superficial cuts were on her chest. The kil er had kept her white

embroidered blouse, cut-off blue jeans, green cotton scarf, and one gold earring. He’d carried away an unusual twenty-four-inch-long necklace

fashioned from driftwood, seaweed, seashel s, seeds, and eucalyptus buttons. She might have been raped. That definitely did not match Zodiac’s

M.O. However, she was found twenty feet from Enterprise Road in a body of water, and Zodiac had once signed “ENTERPRISE” at the bottom of a

letter.

Tuesday, April 25, 1972

Jeanette Kamahele, twenty,
another Santa Rosa Junior Col ege student, was also hitchhiking north near the Cotati on-ramp of Highway 101

when she disappeared. Her intended destination was Santa Rosa, where Leigh Al en had kept a trailer since 1970.

Friday, May 5, 1972

Allen was in
a rage—he had just been fired from the Pinole refinery. Though his questioning by the police had been ten long months earlier, he

considered his termination a direct result of their prying and innuendo. Leigh’s dismissal would create additional difficulties for Armstrong and

Toschi. Now that the prime suspect was a ful -time Sonoma State student, studying science and art, he began living most of each week in his Santa

Rosa trailer. In the future any serious search required they choose between Santa Rosa and Val ejo—cities outside their jurisdiction. The situation

was made more formidable by the fact that Al en was not their only suspect. A couple of others, at least in the beginning, looked good.

A while back, Larry Friedman, an NYPD cop for two years, rang Toschi. They met at a coffee shop. “I thought you would be interested in this,”

Friedman said. “A Crocker Bank employee lived a block away when Paul Stine was murdered.” Toschi already knew. “We had a couple of guys

here in San Francisco,” Toschi said, “who were absolutely convinced that the Zodiac was a local bank honcho. Al the circumstantial evidence fit

perfectly. He original y lived down in Southern California when Bates was murdered. He owned property near Lake Berryessa and went hunting

often in Montana, a place where Zodiac said he had been active; where it’s easy to buy guns that can’t real y be traced. Their information was so

good that we had to check their suspect out. We eliminated the man completely based on his prints not matching those on Stine’s cab.” The FBI

went a step further, analyzing a blockprinted note passed by a robber to a Crocker tel er to see if it matched Zodiac’s printing.

Another suspect looked like a bear, but a bear with a shock of red hair and wearing dark glasses. The “Bear Man” was a “kinda scary guy,”

Toschi told me, “steel-wool hair, loping long arms. He col ected guns and ammo—a rifle carbine, but no .22’s or 9-mm. He was a theater janitor who

lived on Hunter Street.” Police theorized Zodiac was not only a hunter, but might be named Hunter or might even possess a wild beast’s attributes.

“We put the ‘Bear Man’ on the lie detector three weeks after the Stine kil ing. I asked the suspect, who volunteered that he was ambidextrous, to

print for me. The writing didn’t match. Though he was general y familiar with Lake Berryessa, he didn’t know the side roads and was not intimate

with Val ejo. I was unable to find anything local y on the suspect, no wants, nor warrants, nor arrests.

“Zodiac might have been a cabbie like Stine. I checked the Department’s cab permit bureau back to 1963. If he ever drove a cab in this city, he

had to be fingerprinted and photographed as an applicant—I found no such person as the ‘Bear Man.’ If he drove a cab it was under another name.

I rechecked with DMV in Sacramento and they had no record of such a person with a current or past driver’s license. However, they purge after

approximately seven years. I sent a Teletype to Las Vegas asking for a copy of his driver’s license and his photo—a seven-to-ten-day wait for that.

And this was just one suspect—back when the case started.”

Like Stine, an earlier Zodiac victim had been shot at close range above the ear. Though police often discounted the Lake Herman Road murders

of December 20, 1968, as being Zodiac’s, a similar contact wound linked them to Stine. Past the rol ing hil s, peaceful pastures, and rugged

quarries out on Lake Herman Road strange things were seen. Three and a half years before, on that pitch-black and lonely thoroughfare, Zodiac

had murdered Betty Lou Jensen and David Faraday, two teenagers on their first date. Good kids: Betty Lou an honor student; David an Eagle

Scout, recipient of the “God and Country Award.”

The night of the murders, Robert Connley and Frank Gasser (of the Gasser Ranch on Highway #2) were out there hunting raccoons. At 9:00 P.M.

they drove their red Ford pickup just beyond Gate #10 leading to the Lake Herman Pumping Station. They parked the pickup twenty-five feet into a

field of the Marshal Ranch, near the pump house. The gated entrance itself was one-quarter mile east of Lake Herman Cottage. As the gate swung

inward, an unidentified truck began going out. The hunters observed a white four-door 1959-’60 Chevrolet Impala parked alongside its path.

Gasser, sixty-nine, wearing a hunting jacket and shining a three-cel flashlight, ambled over to the Impala. Curious, he peered into the front seat,

then the back. The car was empty. “Perhaps its owner is out scouting the area,” he thought.

An hour later Bingo Wesher, a rancher on the Old Borges Ranch by the Humble Oil Company, began tending sheep just east of Benicia Pumping

Station #9. He observed Gasser and Connley’s truck, recognizable by its wood sideboards and bright color, and saw the Impala parked by the

south fence entrance. He could not tel if it was occupied. A “dark car, lacking in chrome” had been seen in the area, and between 9:30 and 10:00

P.M. a blue Valiant, driven by two men, chased another couple along Lake Herman Road at “a high rate of speed.” Another witness saw a “White

Chevrolet, Impala sedan 1961-63” in the area.

Two other witnesses passed the pumping station entrance at 10:15 and saw a 1960 four-door station wagon facing toward the gate. The two-

tone (dark tan over light tan) Nash Rambler was the victims’ car. Fifteen minutes later the witnesses returned. The station wagon now faced the

opposite direction. At 11:00 P.M. Connley and Gasser finished hunting and saw the Impala was gone. The Rambler was parked in the same spot,

facing southwest and in a different spot than police found it an hour later. A Humble Oil worker driving home from Benicia after his graveyard shift

saw
two
cars parked at the pump house entrance. “The car parked nearest to the road was a 1955 or 1956 station wagon, boxy type, neutral color,”

he said. “The other was parked to the right and abreast of the station wagon. The cars were about ten feet apart. I could not give a description of

the make or color of the other car.”

The Rambler’s motor
was stil lukewarm when Detective Sergeant Les Lundblad of the Solano County Sheriff’s office arrived at five minutes after

midnight. The car’s ignition key was on, but the motor was not running. The kids had been using the heater. The front of the four door brown-beige

’61 Rambler Station Wagon in the entranceway now pointed east. The right front door stood wide open, the remaining three doors and tailgate stil

locked, but the right rear window had been smashed. The girl’s white fur coat, along with her purse, lay on the rear seat on the driver’s side. Though

a deep heel mark was found behind the pumphouse, the gravel surface produced nothing of great significance in the way of readable footprints and

no visible tire tracks were left on the frozen ground.

Coroner Dan Horan, Dr. Byron Sanford, Captain Daniel Pitta, Officers Wil iam T. Warner, Waterman, and Butterbach, and a reporter from the

Fairfield Daily Republic
, Thomas D. Balmer, were already there. Benicia cops Pierre Bidou and Lieutenant George Little, who photographed the

two bodies, joined the bustling scene. Zodiac counted on competing police agencies to hamper the investigation.

Warner did a chalk outline around David’s body. Horan pronounced Betty Lou DOS. and, after Little had taken as many pictures from as many

angles as possible, ordered her body to the morgue. Sergeant Cunningham had Deputy J. R. Wilson go to Val ejo General Hospital to take pictures

of David, but when he arrived he learned the boy had been DOA. In the meantime Lundblad ascertained that one bul et had been fired into the top

of the Rambler leaving a ricochet mark on the roof. Another had shattered the rear window. An expended .22-caliber casing from the kil er’s gun lay

on the right floorboard of the Rambler. Nine other expended casings were on the ground, to the right at distances of twenty feet, fourteen feet, eight

feet two inches, four feet one-half inch, three feet, two feet three inches, one foot eleven inches, and one foot one-half inch. They showed how the

boy had been shot as he exited and how the kil er pursued the girl on the run. The fatal bul ets that kil ed Jensen and Faraday were at first thought to

be from a High Standard Model 101. Along the road, Benicia police recovered a Hi-Standard H-P Military .22 automatic with eradicated serial

numbers. It had been previously disassembled by someone and the firing pin altered. They examined test bul ets with six right-hand grooves, as did

the questioned bul ets removed from the victims. Different guns had been involved. No one could explain how the kil er had fired so accurately in the

dark unless he had some sort of light on the barrel.

An irregularly flattened bul et removed from the left frontal lobe of the boy (he had been shot behind the upper right ear) and the bul ets from the